David Hockney is no more a “professional Yorkshireman” than are Alan Bennett
or Michael Parkinson

Home is the most emotional word in any language. It evokes so many things – childhood, landscape, and every kind of association: visual, musical, magical, nonsensical. It is rooted in birth, upbringing, schooling, and the flight from all these things. We know what home means, every one of us, but we don’t always want to be there. It can be too unsettling.

It was no surprise then when Sir Ian McKellen’s proclamation that he no longer felt northern raised a few hackles in the county of his birth. Pointing out that he had spent the greater part of his life away from Lancashire, where he was brought up, he told the Radio Times that he was a Londoner by residence and by choice.

There can be no argument with that. London, being the kind of city that attracts people from all over the world, makes Londoners of us all. To declare an interest, I went to primary school a decent six-iron away from Bolton School, where the young McKellen was educated. Like him I have spent most of my adult life in London. Like him I shall not be going back, not to live. Yet I am still a Lancastrian, as is he were he to be absolutely honest.

We are shaped by different forces. Clearly the most important element in McKellen’s life was the three years he spent at Cambridge, where he read English and took the first steps in an acting career that has brought him fulfilment on the stage and latterly fame (and money) on the screen. He is now a man of the world, so why should Bolton matter?

Because we can never escape, that’s why. Ignore those self-proclaimed trendies who think they have slipped the shackles of identity. We don’t have to be tribal, but ancestral loyalties demand our attention and certain attachments formed early in life carry a greater emotional weight than we suppose.

The idea of home, or departure and return, lies at the heart of Western literature. Homer’s mighty tale, the one that started everything, began with a row about a woman, but what was Ulysses thinking about as he fought his way back to Ithaca? A life with Penelope, that’s what. Slippers and pipe, a hog roasting on the spit, the wine-dark sea on his doorstep, and a good moan about the ghastly Trojans.

Human desires haven’t changed much in all the centuries since the Greeks embellished their tales. The sense of belonging, and therefore of separation and loss, exists within every sentient being. Sometimes you don’t even have to belong. Think of all those “Irish Americans” who have never set foot on Irish soil, or even know where Ireland is. That’s the Celtic Twilight for you.

It is not just the cliché of the Russian who fills up at the sight of a birch tree, though that goes some way towards proving the point. Why did Wystan Auden, after spending 30 years in Manhattan, decide to return to Oxford in 1968, hoping that his old college, Christ Church, would protect him in his dotage? To come home, of course. Christ Church did put him up but only for a while, and Auden died a sad old man in Austria.

David Hockney, another Englishman who chose to spend his most vital years in the US, has also returned. From Los Angeles to Bridlington is a mighty stride but it hasn’t done him any harm. His “Yorkshire series” of East Riding landscapes proved a spectacular success at the Royal Academy two years ago. After half a century of living high on the hog in New York, LA and Paris, the boy from Bradford had come home.

Hockney is not, as somebody was daft enough to write, a “professional Yorkshireman”, any more than Alan Bennett, or Michael Parkinson. Parky, who has a discriminating eye, collects paintings by Frank Auerbach. You won’t find many of those in the garrets of Barnsley.

What, in any case, does “professional northerner” (PN) mean? Often it signifies nothing more than a person who was born north of Nottingham and doesn’t feel the need to apologise. By that yardstick, D H Lawrence may have been a PN, but calling him one won’t help the reader to understand his novels. It is a phrase best avoided.

There are, however, some dullards who wear their northernness like a badge of honour. Last year the solipsistic journalist Paul Morley wrote a long, rambling book about the North, which got little further than stating that there were some strong football teams in Lancashire, and that Liverpool and Manchester had produced plenty of pop groups. If that is all the North has done in the past thousand years, no wonder McKellen won’t go back. Few of us would.

It is not wrong for a PN to talk of “dinner” instead of lunch. Breakfast, dinner, tea: the three meals of the working day. Nor is it rude to pronounce nougat as “nuggat”, or call an alleyway a snicket. Please, please, though, do not say “ee by gum”, a phrase this Lancastrian has never heard in real life, and do not represent the hard U with a double O. It is bugger, not “booger”.

The Chinese say we are homesick above all for the food of our childhood. Even McKellen might sniff something of his childhood in a bag of fish and chips (if they run to such things in the chi-chi pub he owns in Limehouse). Perhaps his eyes go moist at the prospect of draining a glass of dandelion and burdock. If he prefers not to feast on tripe, though, don’t think badly of him. There are some things no Lancastrian should attempt.